The vast majority of working Americans haven’t seen a real raise in
35 years.
Meanwhile, every year, their health care, education, insurance and household
costs rise. Their employers eliminate pensions. And their kids struggle with
rising college or
technical school tuition and debt.
Workers worry whether they will
ever be able to pay the bills.
The Marie Antoinette $45,000 Thanksgiving includes two turkeys. Because when would one, 20-pound free-range, organically raised bird at $75 a pound ever be enough?
The 1 percent can spend $45,000 for a Thanksgiving supper
because they’re gobbling up virtually all
of the income from workers’ productivity increases. And now
they’ve launched a new assault on workers. It’s a lawsuit called Friedrichs v.
California Teachers Association (CTA). The 1 percent hopes it will prevent
public service workers like teachers from joining together to collectively
bargain for better wages and working conditions.
The Marie Antoinette $45,000 Thanksgiving includes gravy made with Pappy Van Winkle bourbon, which goes for $4,900 a bottle. Because when would $9 worth of cooking sherry ever be good enough?
If the $45,000-Thanksgiving-dinner crew wins the case,
they’ll go after private-sector labor organizations next. They do not intend to stop until there’s nothing left for the other 99%.
The Friedrichs case is about power.
Individual workers don’t
bargain for raises with gigantic multinational corporations and government
agencies.
They beg.
But when workers band together and seek raises as a group,
they gain for themselves the power necessary to negotiate. A fact that is intolerable
to 1 percenters. And that’s why they’re backing the Friedrichs case – to prevent workers from ever gaining that negotiating power.
Defending their right to collectively bargain are public
service workers – the likes of firemen, teachers, social workers and public
health nurses. The labor organizations these workers belong to try to ensure
that they receive living wages and decent retirement benefits.
But just as importantly, public service workers also use
their collective voice to negotiate in the public interest, including improving
response times for paramedics and lowering social worker caseloads to allow
adequate time to investigate child abuse allegations.
Public school teachers, who spend an average of $500 a year out
of their own pockets for classroom supplies, routinely bargain to secure the
smaller class sizes that parents want, to protect the recess breaks that
elementary students need and to preserve arts and music education.
